Photos from one guy's travels around the world -- from UNESCO World Heritage Sites to national parks to his own backyard in Texas, and lots of places in between.

Saturday, July 29, 2017

Chatham

It had been four years since we'd taken our last biannual summer trip to New England to visit family. So clearly, we were well overdue. That's how I found myself back on Cape Cod a couple of weeks ago, checking the weather forecast for a good morning to go out and shoot. The one I chose called for thick early fog giving way to partly cloudy skies. I had a pretty good idea of what effect thick fog would have on a sunrise, but I aimed to find out for certain.

Chatham was my specific destination, mainly to continue the search for shorebird chicks I had begun in Galveston the previous month. The town also has a famous lighthouse, the purpose of which was quite obvious given the conditions.

Speaking of the conditions, it was readily apparent that the effect of thick fog on a sunrise is to, in effect, eliminate it all together. Which was fine, because the fog had its own unique beauty in how it obscured the distance.

As I walked the shore at Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, I was intrigued by some delicately balanced cairns that someone had obviously taken great care to construct.

The fact that nobody had as of yet knocked them over just because they could did a nice bit of restoring one's faith in humanity.

My real purpose in visiting Monomoy was to photograph the aforementioned shorebirds. As the current visibility precluded that, I returned to town to explore other sights such as Lighthouse Beach ...

... and the Chatham Fish Pier. Things were equally quiet and moody all around, so after grabbing a cup of coffee and killing some time hoping for the fog which I had known full well would be there to burn off, I decided to return to Monomoy so as to be in position to start taking pictures of those shorebird chicks, if, in fact, there were any about and the fog did, actually, go away.

The fog had not, in fact, as of yet gone away when I returned to the refuge. Of course, all of these different locations were no more than a few minutes' drive from each other. So it wasn't as if a tremendous amount of time had passed. Still, there had been enough time for the tide to come in to the point where continuing down the shore became a trickier proposition unless one cared to walk on the rocks rather than the sand.

The rising tide had engulfed the base of the cairns, as well, yielding a different sort of scene that I decided was worth another picture. And what was that high in the sky? Could the sun be finally making a concerted effort to appear?